Carson College faculty members win two awards for publications on using the Giving Voice to Values approach to teach ethics to accounting students.

A framework for addressing small and large workplace conflicts has been sweeping the business world. Called Giving Voice to Values, it was created by Mary Gentile, a professor at Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.

But does it truly work, and if so, what is the evidence? That was the question on the minds of Jane Cote and Claire Kamm Latham, professors in WSU Vancouver’s Carson College of Business.

“We were impressed with the framework she was using to teach students and professionals how to address ethical challenges in the workplace,” said Cote, academic director for the Carson College. “It’s an active learning approach, and it resonates when we go to workshops and get together with academics. But to move it forward, Claire and I felt we should explore the efficacy of the training. Do people feel good about it and go home and never use it, or does it have a more lasting impact?”

Jane Cote

What is GVV?

GVV provides tools to move from recognizing ethical conflicts to speaking up when confronted with conflicts. Through practice, it helps to instill awareness and self-confidence.

“One reason I feel it works so well is it builds on your strengths,” Latham said. “You know what works for you, but we don’t have that finely tuned. Through these exercises, you develop game plans and scripts so that in this situation you are more comfortable—so that when something happens and a boundary is crossed, your mind won’t go blank.”

Clair Kamm Latham

Cote and Latham introduced GVV training into the accounting program at WSU Vancouver six years ago. It turned out to be the ideal time to begin studying how well it works. Now, the use of GVV in WSU Vancouver accounting classes has resulted in two award-winning publications. Cote and Latham received the 2017 Outstanding Accounting Education Research Award for a paper on developing ethical confidence through the accounting curriculum; and the 2017 Outstanding Author Contribution for a second paper on using a peer-to-peer approach to teach the GVV framework.

“What’s unique about Jane’s and my research is that we were the first to show in certain settings that GVV works, so that’s exciting,” said Latham, associate professor of accounting.

“We not only have tested its efficacy but also explored in the process embedding it throughout the accounting curriculum,” Cote said.

Peer training—intriguing results

The peer-to-peer approach in the classroom has proved particularly interesting. Students have their first exposure to the GVV approach in the introductory accounting class. Upper-division accounting honor society members also complete GVV exercises and casework in upper-division classes. Then, with faculty guidance, those students create and deliver workshops for the introductory class—essentially serving as peer coaches so the introductory students learn about ethics from their peers rather than faculty members.

The study found that peer instruction resonates with students, especially with ethics training, because the peer instructors are sharing their experiences and emphasizing the importance of the curriculum. An unexpected finding was the increase in student engagement with co-curricular activities.

A longer-term, between-subjects study explored the efficacy of embedding GVV across the accounting curriculum. In an accounting capstone course, students study the professional code of ethics and read a case study about a new accountant who told a white lie about passing the CPA exam during her first month on the job. After the case discussion, students had access but not authority to access certain class materials. The learning outcome was to illustrate that the code of professional conduct expects accountants to respect confidentiality of client information. Students were asked if they had crossed this boundary, and faculty were able to observe their behavior.

Before the introduction of GVV into the curriculum, all students looked and most students lied about looking at the confidential information. Afterward, none of the students accessed the confidential information. Debriefing both groups uncovered that students in the early group had rationalized that because everyone would violate confidentiality, they should too.

After the intensive GVV training, students said they understood that most students shared values related to honesty and respect and thus chose to not cross the boundary. This understanding led to the change in the behavior. This finding has implications for workplace training and the power that understanding others can have for building an ethical workplace culture.

Trainings as fundraisers

Cote and Latham also conduct trainings with organizations and, in particular, CPA firms to provide ethics workshops that qualify for continuing education credit for CPAs in Oregon. In appreciation, firms donate funds to the Carson College in Vancouver to support students and programs. To date, these efforts have raised tens of thousands of dollars to fund student scholarships, faculty research and program activities.

On April 27, Cote and Latham are conducting a GVV workshop for women in the Vancouver area, titled “Strengthening Women’s Voices in the Workplace.” It will be a fundraiser for the college’s Business Growth Mentor & Analysis Program (MAP), which provides pro-bono consulting services to small businesses in the region. More than half of the small business owners in Southwest Washington are women, and Cote and Latham hope attendees will learn valuable tools while creating resources for other women in the region. The event will be held at Fort Vancouver.

“This workshop will provide people with the tools they can use to create a strategy to address situations that cross an ethical boundary,” Cote said. “In the workplace, such situations often arise at inopportune moments. Taken off guard, we often feel somewhat mute; where do we start? That’s where our training comes in.”

Sue Peabody’s seventh book, “Madeleine’s Children: Family, Freedom, Secrets, and Lies in France’s Indian Ocean Colonies,” published in 2017, is the signature achievement to date of her career as a historian. And it affirms her reputation as the world’s foremost expert on the law of slavery and race in the French Empire.

Peabody is the Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and History at Washington State University Vancouver. “Madeleine’s Children” is the first full-length biography tracing the lives of slaves in the Indian Ocean world. It is largely the story of the youngest of Madeleine’s three children, Furcy. Peabody calls it a “microhistory”—exploring the society at large through the life of one family.

Her publisher, Oxford University Press, describes the book as “a detailed family saga set against the broader context of plantation slavery, Parisian society and colonization.” The individual histories of family members illuminate the types of labor slaves performed and the varying nature of their relationships with society and plantation owners.

Through 10 years of research, what Peabody discovered was not what she had expected. Furcy—who had fought for his freedom in court for 25 years and finally won—soon became a slave owner himself.

“It was a disappointment to me to learn this,” said Peabody. “But it was not atypical for free people in the Indian Ocean world. Furcy was in a system and he made use of the system to advance himself.”

Owning slaves was a steppingstone to the middle class, she explained. “One of the first things free people of color did when they could afford it was to buy slaves,” Peabody said. The slave owner could rent out slaves and take the wages. “It was a capital accumulation process,” she said. “Over time, the master can use accumulated savings to buy more slaves and land, and rise slowly in status through this process.”

A story that many did not want told

But if Furcy was no abolitionist, he and his lawyers proferred many reasons to challenge his wrongful enslavement, and Peabody’s research uncovered the many ways that slave owners sought to keep his story hidden. “Careful attention to Furcy’s legal battles reveals the hypocrisy, contradictions, and outright fabrications deployed by planters, colonial legal officials, and metropolitan authorities to maintain slavery, as well as idealists’ efforts to reform corruption and exploitation,” she writes in the book. Furcy believed he should be free because his mother had worked for a plantation owner to purchase her son’s freedom, but was tricked out of the wages owed to her. Furcy’s lawyers, recognizing that his assertions could not hold sway in court, concocted other legal grounds: that Indians (as opposed to Africans) could not be legally enslaved, and that his mother’s brief residence on France’s “free soil” (in Europe) was sufficient to free her. It was the free soil argument that finally secured his status as a freeborn man, making him eligible for reparations.

Peabody traveled to Réunion three times, and Mauritius twice (as well as Paris, Aix-en-Provence and London) to find the crucial documents to tell Furcy’s story. Her research sources—most of which were in French—included “three grocery bags of documents the archivist in Réunion brought to me in 2008,” Peabody said. “I was the first historian to look at them. They had hardly been catalogued.” In addition, she pored over census records, parish records, notary records, letters and newspapers.

Historical documents damaged by worms and water

Recently, Peabody was invited to travel to Réunion for a conference on new sources for the study of slavery. Scholars from throughout the French empire attended, and Peabody gave a presentation on some of the problems of interpreting the sources. Her research was reported in the newspapers of Réunion and Mauritius, where Furcy is something of a cause célèbre.

Furcy‘s life has been celebrated in a novel, two plays and a song by Kaf Malbar; and to a group of contemporary activists, Furcy is a symbol against oppression. Peabody has met with members of the group “Liber nout Furcy [Let us free Furcy],” and while they too expressed disappointment that Furcy is not the hero they had initially thought him to be, they believe it is nevertheless essential to honor and memorialize his long fight for freedom. Freedom, Peabody writes, “meant belonging to family, acknowledging the debt to ancestors, and preparing a legacy for generations yet to come.”

As Kaf Malbar says in his song “ Furcy’s Gold,” “We need this story to tell to our children.”

We collect mountains of information about everything, but what are we supposed to do with it? Bala Krishnamoorthy says mathematics can help figure it out.

People, businesses and institutions are collecting more and more data, but often don’t know what to do with it. That’s where mathematics comes in. Bala Krishnamoorthy, associate professor and program leader of mathematics and statistics at WSU Vancouver, is participating in a project funded by the National Science Foundation that he describes as follows: “The grant is about applying mathematical techniques to make sense of the loads and loads of data that people are collecting.”

Specifically, the grant will use data analysis to help develop new management techniques for agricultural crops. Using maize as their model system, the researchers want to understand how certain genes interact with environmental conditions to produce higher or lower yields. “The same gene behaves differently depending on where the plant is growing,” Krishnamoorthy said. “Even within a few acres of a farm, there will be local climate changes.”

He is one of three WSU scientists who received a $761,428 NSF grant for the three-year project in July. The others are computer scientist Anantharaman Kalyanaraman (principal investigator) and statistical genomics expert Zhiwu Zhang, both in Pullman. The multiuniversity project also includes Patrick Schnable, a plant scientist from Iowa State University, and Bei Wang Phillips, a visualization expert from the University of Utah, who also received NSF support, bringing total funding for the project to $1.2 million.

Historically, growers have used trial-and-error methods in their efforts to improve crop yields. But technology has made it possible to amass vast amounts of data through sensors in their fields. The challenge now is to figure out what data is most important. Was it temperature or humidity or irrigation—or something else—that made the difference?

“Right now they don’t know what to look for,” Krishnamoorthy said. “They have the capability to collect all sorts of data, but they are blindly collecting it. They would rather be more strategic, with some goal in mind. We are developing the tools to help them formulate hypotheses that could then be tested—so they can evaluate the genotypic variety of crop that will do well under certain conditions.”

Broad application

The tools can have many applications beyond crops—helping to make sense of data in healthcare, political voting patterns, the power grid, even sports. In basketball, for instance, “some guards play well under certain conditions, while others do not,” Krishnamoorthy said. “You can apply similar techniques to see patterns in that.”

And you won’t have to be a mathematician to use the tools. “The math needs to be done,” he said, “but it will be useful only if non-mathematical practitioners can understand what it does. We are developing software that will be intuitive and interactive.”

Krishnamoorthy’s dream research situation, he said, encompasses both pure and applied mathematics: He meets someone who has a question or a need, then goes to work: developing a pure mathematical theorem, based on that developing new computational tools, and then giving the problem-solving software to the person who brought the question in the beginning.

He believes deeply in disseminating research through open source publication. The current system of peer review, with its anonymous comments and long time frame, lacks accountability, he said. And yet the stakes are so high—for the person publishing the research, tenure and promotion often hang in the balance.

“We need to make things more open,” he said. “Any federally funded research or publication should have some version of the publications available for the public to look at. The more open, the more people will look at it, and it will get feedback. Change won’t happen overnight, but maybe in two decades it will be the prevalent model for all academic research—but particularly mathematics.”

Butterflies have captivated Cheryl Schultz ever since she was a “naïve and idealistic” graduate student at the University of Washington, looking for a way “to make real contributions to conservation.” The first professional conference she attended opened her eyes to the political realities. Hearing a discussion between The Nature Conservancy and academic ecologists, she realized that “the academic side had strong interests and The Nature Conservancy had strong needs, but there was a gap between them.”

Bridging that gap has become her life’s work. At the time, The Nature Conservancy was looking for a way to mitigate species declines by buying land for preserves. Schultz, now an associate professor of biological sciences at WSU Vancouver, wanted to use scientific research for conservation purposes: to construct solutions that would protect the environment while enabling the people who live in a place to use its resources. She decided to make the pros and cons of one potential solution—habitat corridors—her thesis project.

In The Nature Conservancy newsletter, she reached out to TNC stewardship ecologists who were thinking about corridors. “Within a couple of weeks, I started getting letters and calls from reserves across the country saying they were thinking about corridors—corridors for birds, corridors for butterflies, corridors for reptiles and more” Schultz said. By the time she had completed her thesis on butterfly corridors, she had learned that dispersed habitats—the “stepping stone” approach—would be more beneficial than a long, narrow flyway corridor. That was a solution that dispersed nature reserves could manage.

The project also introduced Schultz to her longtime collaborator, Elizabeth Crone, a National Science Foundation fellow at the time and now a professor at Tufts University. Over the last 25 years, they have collaborated on dozens of projects, studying many species of butterflies, including western monarchs, the Oregon silverspot and—their primary model species—Fender’s blue.

The science of land stewardship

Schultz and Crone seek to combine ecological theory with natural history to develop management techniques that can benefit butterfly populations, such as planting native species and controlled burning. The goal is to develop “flexible guidance” useful to conservation-minded property owners and agencies.

Their practical approach is exactly what many funders have been looking for. “A lot of inquiries have been coming in,” Schultz said. “That rarely happens, especially in this funding climate.”

This summer, Schultz and Crone’s study of western monarch butterflies made headlines across the country. In a paper for Biological Conservation, they reported that migratory monarchs in the American West have declined rapidly over the past 35 years, and could be extinct as we know them in another 35 years. “In the 1980s, 10 million monarchs spent the winter in coastal California,” Schultz said. “Today there are barely 300,000.” Although the reasons are not yet clear, loss and modification of butterfly habitat and widespread pesticide use are likely culprits, the researchers said.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which funded the study, is currently considering whether to list the monarch butterfly as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

Time to rebuild

The main focus of Schultz’s work, however, is not so much to document risks to vulnerable species but to reverse them. Her studies have generated much hopeful news. For example, several nature reserves adopting study recommendations have made great strides in restoring land for butterfly habitat, reducing weeds and enhancing nectar resources.

In one patch of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management in the Eugene, Ore., area, for example, where Schultz has been working since the 1990s with several agencies, the Fender’s blue population has grown from less than 100 to more than 9,000 in 2015. Using experimental fire, weed control and planting of nectar sources, “they took restoration to heart,” Schultz said. “As a result, they will call back and say we have other questions we want answers to, and that will lead to other projects and other questions. I’ve been fortunate to work with good people who really listen and care about using science to do conservation.”

New on the horizon is a five-year grant looking at the viability of various species on Department of Defense lands. The project is funded by SERDP—the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program—which is DoD’s environmental science and technology program. Schultz and Crone will use butterflies as a model system to examine how environmental changes affect endangered populations. The research will lead to three activities designed expressly to improve land stewardship: fact sheets, a decision support framework, and meetings with local managers to help make sure the framework addresses their needs.

“We argued that butterflies are a good system to answer their questions,” she said. “Because of their short life spans, we can get several generations in a five-year project.”

Fortunately, that idealistic young graduate student found her calling. “We really can come together, do the science, build the partnerships and take the time to rebuild the populations,” Schultz said. “With Fender’s blue, we’ve been doing the science for the last 25 years, and it’s working. For monarchs and other butterflies, I want to leave people with a sense of the possible: It’s not going to happen overnight, but we can do this. Working with Fender’s blue has been a very positive experience. The potential to help turn around other butterfly species keeps me going.”

Roschelle (Shelly) Fritz usually draws her research conclusions from qualitative rather than quantitative data. That is, instead of building a case with numbers, she typically reads a narrative or asks questions to detect patterns and derive meaning. A recent grant awarded to Fritz and two Washington State University colleagues gives her a new challenge: qualitative analysis of quantitative data. Now, instead of looking for meaning in what someone says, she remarked, “I am looking for meaning in data regarding how someone moved.”

That someone would be an older adult living independently in a “smart home,” with sensors recording the person’s movement. Fritz’s job is to interpret that data using a clinical lens. The project seeks to determine whether technology can help people stay in their homes longer.

To investigate how smart-home technology can monitor the health and safety of older adults from afar, the project received a five-year, $1.77 million grant from the National Institute of Nursing Research—part of the National Institutes of Health. Its title: “A Clinician-in-the-Loop Smart Home to Support Health Monitoring and Intervention for Chronic Conditions.”

The three researchers, all female, have complementary perspectives. Diane Cook, professor in the School of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, provides the technology expertise. Maureen Schmitter-Edgecombe, a professor of psychology, is exploring whether health interventions affect cognitive health. Fritz, an assistant professor of nursing at WSU Vancouver, provides the clinical judgment.

THE MEANING OF BEHAVIORAL CHANGE

For the study, multiple sensors are placed strategically in five homes in retirement communities in Spokane. (The research may expand to other locations during the grant period.) The sensors detect motion and record the residents’ data moment by moment. The clinician analyzes the data to determine their routines, such as getting out of bed to go to the bathroom or the kitchen at night. When the clinician flags a particular pattern as important, the engineer creates an algorithm to trigger an automatic alert to caregivers in the absence of that motion. If the change is significant, it may indicate the need for a “health intervention,” such as a visit or call.

Fritz is well suited to the task. She has been a nurse for 25 years, with experience in emergency rooms, public health, hospitals and employee health, as well as teaching.

The sensor technology adds something lacking in previous research, where people tell the researcher about their experience. That something is accuracy. “Sensor data has more credibility than when someone self-reports,” Fritz said. While someone might neglect to tell a caregiver about a recent slip, for example, the behavior change cannot be ignored by the smart home.

During the grant period, the research will focus on developing the machine learning piece of the puzzle. Taking into account the person’s health condition—such as a chronic disease—Fritz will tell the engineers what she believes she is seeing in the data, and they will develop an algorithm and alerts when motion indicating a change in health state is noted.

“We are not doing diagnostics,” Fritz said, “but training an intelligent machine to understand what a change in health state looks like, much as a home health nurse would assess that.” Essentially, they are training the machine to learn about the individual’s health and behavior.

BRIDGING TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EXPERIENCE

The research also seeks to inform engineers’ ability to communicate effectively with clinicians, Fritz said. “The only way the data can impact clinical decision making is if we are provided information we can understand. How do you take big data like this and present it to a healthcare provider in a way that’s meaningful and relevant to their work—which medicines or treatments to prescribe?”

Students will be working on the project along with the researchers. Cook’s and Schmitter-Edgecombe’s student engineers and psychologists are developing visual analytics based on the data and working with Fritz’s nursing informatics students to determine what visuals nurses like best. “Classes will go back and forth doing that,” Fritz said. “It’s very fun and innovative, multidisciplinary teaching.”The project’s long-term goals address today’s major health concerns, from growth of the aging population to the shortage of caregivers to the cost of healthcare. One big question: Can technology make it possible to extend the reach of caregivers and nurses? Perhaps.

Cost is another matter. “It’s a very simple sensor technology,” Fritz said. “What’s expensive is the infrastructure and brains behind the algorithm.”

Smart homes are not new. For example, Cook has developed a “Smart Home in a Box,” currently deployed in more than 110 homes around the world. Bringing in a clinician to study the data, along with automating health monitoring, assessment and evaluation of the intervention impact, is an important new step in determining whether the system can help individuals manage chronic health conditions.

“We are nowhere near a market-ready product,” Fritz said. “This is very futuristic.”

In the late 1970s, when Candice Goucher began researching African metalwork, she had the field practically to herself.

“I’m recognized as being kind of an old timer in terms of research on African ironworking,” said Goucher, professor of history at WSU Vancouver. Initially she worked with a blacksmith in 1979 in a small village in Ghana. Around the same time, she was involved in an archeological excavation of a medieval town. There, she discovered the extraordinary technology involved in the production of iron objects, implements and weapons that supported everyday life.

Goucher climbing into an iron-smelting furnace in Togo, 1984.

Now, her decades of research are coming to fruition in a monumental exhibition, “Striking Iron: The Arts of the African Blacksmith,” which opens in spring 2018 at the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles and travels to Paris and other cities. Goucher is a collaborator on the project and also co-editor of a book to be published by the University of California Press in conjunction with the exhibition.

In addition, she is working on another volume about African ironworking as it has spread throughout the African diaspora via immigration. “I am looking at the global impact of African technology, which has been very understudied and underappreciated,” Goucher said. Tentatively titled “The Memory of Iron,” this book will seek to restore the role of African ironworkers to the history of technology, which for centuries has ignored Africa.

In her proposal for “The Memory of Iron,” Goucher points out the “terrible ambivalence” of iron in the lives of African people. The metal meant brutality as well as beauty. She writes:

Between about 1508 and 1880, iron was ubiquitous across the Atlantic: iron shackles and chains restrained the 12 million enslaved Africans, destined for voyages in ironclad sailing vessels. As key agricultural laborers, these Africans and their descendants would wield iron cutlasses in Caribbean sugarcane fields. In the hands of rebels and freedom fighters, their iron tools and weapons could transform moments of brutality into successful resistance.

Skills with iron were valued in the New World, and the knowledge of African craftsmen helped forge a new understanding of working with metal. “We now know Africans contributed essential knowledge and skills, especially to the Americas but also to the whole Atlantic world,” Goucher said. She sees “The Memory of Iron” as the culmination of decades of interdisciplinary scholarship around African metallurgy.

After excavation of an iron foundry in Jamaica, 1995.

AN INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE

Ironwork is just one thread of Goucher’s scholarship. Her work combines the theories and methods of history, archaeology, ethnography, art history, ecology and chemistry. She is well known for her books and articles on African foodways, metallurgy, and popular and political culture, as well as global themes in world history.

Goucher has studied Caribbean food almost as long as she has studied African ironworking. Among her many honors, her 2014 book “Congotay! Congotay!” won both the National and the World Gourmand Awards for Best Book on Caribbean Food.

In the classroom, Goucher has been instrumental in shifting the teaching of world history from an outdated rise-and-fall-of-civilizations approach to a more engaged thematic approach to the past, which makes it possible to see contemporary global and environmental issues borne of history. “It’s a way to make history more relevant to our lives,” Goucher said.

The approach has been widely adopted by secondary schools and colleges. Goucher is co-author of one of the leading textbooks, World History: Journeys from Past to Present, (2008; second edition, 2013), which has been translated into Chinese, Korean and Portuguese. Her online multimedia project Bridging World History (with 26 videos) has been viewed on public television stations and classrooms in nearly every state as a model of the thematic approach to world history. In 2015, Goucher was awarded the Pioneer in World History prize from the World History Association.

Next year’s exhibition in Los Angeles promises a different kind of thrill than solitary scholars usually get to experience—as well as the possibility that a missing link in the worldwide history of technology will receive its rightful recognition. “It is so much fun to be around other people who are so excited about these works of art that African blacksmiths created over centuries,” Goucher said. “The longevity of African ironworking over the millennia and the survival of the arts into 21st century makes the African continent an important place to think about the history of technology.”

Visitors entering the gallery see jagged swaths of color—the earthy colors found in topographical maps of the San Fernando Valley and San Gabriel Fault line in California.

Rumbling sounds of tremors and earthquakes interrupt the silence. It is as if visitors have entered a troubled landscape where the ground beneath their feet cannot be trusted.

Avantika Bawa’s most recent installation, “Parallel Faults,” was on view from March 16 through April 6 at Los Angeles Valley College, in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Visitors might feel a sense of foreboding from the landscape around them—a valley run through with invisible fault lines, shadowed by a ring of mountain ranges.

“I wanted to respond to the colors of the topography as seen in maps and the idea of being sunken in, with this force that surrounds you and can implode any time,” she said.

A FOUNDATION IN RESEARCH

Bawa, an associate professor of fine art at WSU Vancouver, creates installations that respond to the geography or architecture of specific sites. She begins with extensive research, scouring the Internet, visiting libraries, poring over maps and books, and talking with researchers in the field. For “Parallel Fault,” she obtained field recordings of earthquakes and tremors from geologists.

Sometimes the research is playful. For “At Owners Risk,” a show in Seattle in 2012, for example, she wanted to capture the idea that the gallery was housed in a former body shop. So she visited body shops to observe their work. Bawa color-coded each element in the installation according to function: blue upright hydraulic lift, yellow clamp forms and so on. “The mechanical form of the hydraulic lift dominates the room and anchors the exhibition as the most obvious reference to auto repair,” wrote Craig Drennen in the catalog essay.

As part of the Portland Biennial in the summer of 2016, Bawa created an installation in Astoria, Ore., for which she received a faculty research minigrant from WSU Vancouver. Called “Mineral Spirits,” the installation is a haunting evocation of the economic cycle that characterizes life on the Oregon coast.

The Astoria building offered for use had once been a grand hotel, then low-income housing, and now was slated to be turned into condominiums and retail spaces. “It was beautiful but falling apart,” Bawa said. “I was taken aback by its vacuousness, its splendor and the decayed state it was in. I thought it would be interesting to address all those issues.”

As her primary material, she built scaffolding—a symbol of growth and construction—and painted it gold to symbolize the hotel’s former prosperity. “But it’s also isolated, which is why it sits in middle of the room,” Bawa said. “It looks like it does something, but it doesn’t—it’s just an object that’s more a metaphor for past and future.”

A BIGGER CHALLENGE

Her position as a fine artist teaching at a research institution with a lot of scientists intrigues Bawa. In fact, it was one of the reasons she came to Vancouver in 2010.

A native of India, Bawa earned her Master of Fine Arts degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and taught at Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. In April 2004 she was part of a team that launched Drain—Journal for Contemporary Art and Culture, which she still edits.

She’d had a lot of success, with work represented in museums and private collections, numerous exhibitions as both artist and curator, prestigious visiting teaching assignments, and many grants, awards and residencies. Looking for a change from the East Coast, she gave herself a year off, drove across the country for a residency and decided to see what happened. She found herself in Portland, where her success as a teacher, artist and lecturer continued. In 2014 she was appointed to the Oregon Arts Commission.

The move west also changed her work. She went from teaching at an art school to being one of two faculty members in a small fine arts department.

“It changed my research component too,” she said. “All these scientists and geologists around me—I wanted to make sure my work was significant in the larger context of life and not just a cool art community. It was a bigger challenge. And I do love working with a diverse body of students who don’t necessarily major in art. It’s a different perspective.”